That evening, he heard her cry in her room.
The girl went back to her village a month later. The painter felt relieved. But two weeks later, another girl took her place. This new girl had just finished high school and had begun to study biology. He hadn’t been told about her arrival either. Any kind of discussion or protest had been useless. He only asked his wife a single question: “And what about the gardener, when is he coming?” She hadn’t answered him.
The village of Khamsa looked like a dry red spot from the mountain’s summit. There were no oases in its surroundings, nor any greenery or shrubbery of any kind. The painter had told himself that it was a cursed douar, nothing but rocks and thistles. Brek agreed. He talked a lot about the village where he’d been born: “God has forgotten us! We don’t have anything! Very little water, no electricity, no schools, no doctor, nothing, nothing grows here, but we have a lot of cats and dogs who are just as hungry as we are. They come here because we let them go wherever they like. So you see, brother, Clirmafirane is a lot better than this! Do you know why Madame Nicole never wrote to me or replied to any of my letters? And what about your cousin, do you think she’ll keep her word?”
When the painter thought he’d taken enough photos and produced enough sketches, he and Brek had returned to the village, where a sumptuous dinner awaited them. The tajine with mutton and olives had been very greasy. He hadn’t been able to eat, and had instead eaten some couscous that was just as greasy as the tajine. He’d been ashamed to be unable to enjoy the dishes that the women had spent the whole day preparing. Fortunately, the other guests had gobbled everything up. He’d slept in the room reserved for prayers. Stomachache and heartburn had prevented him from getting a wink of sleep. He’d left the house early the next morning and discovered a light that was incredibly soft and subtle. He took a few photos in order to remember it. On his return to Paris he’d immediately started to work on paintings about everything that he’d seen and which had affected him during that trip.
His wife had stormed into his studio and recognized her village. The two canvases were still unfinished. She’d looked at them and on her way out she’d said:
“The money you make from those paintings will go to Khamsa. You don’t have the right to exploit those poor people. They don’t even know that you’re profiting from their misery. You’re just like your photographer friend who shoots workers in the mines and then exhibits them so he can make a pile of cash. This kind of thing should be forbidden.”
Even though he didn’t know whether she’d heard him, he’d said:
“They’re not for sale.”
IX. Casablanca, 1995
Some people say that you can tell what the souls of the dead have transformed into by looking at how the color of their hair has changed.
One day, by which time they were living in their beautiful new house in Casablanca, his wife had come up to him and told him in a laconic tone: “I know you’re cheating on me, and I even know with who!”
The time of suspicions had begun. She would never stop. She would spy on him and never trust anything he said, and was skeptical of every woman in his entourage. Her jealousy knew no bounds. While he’d been preparing to leave for Berlin to appear on a panel about art and literature with Anselm Kiefer, his wife had told him that the trip had been canceled.
“How is that possible?” he’d asked. “Who did that?”
“Why, I did, who else? A girl called to ask what time your flight was going to land in Berlin, it was a North African girl, someone called Asma … I could tell from her voice that she was a little slut, and so I told her my husband wasn’t interested in that so-called symposium and that he was going to stay here with his wife, then I hung up on her.”
That episode had made the painter furious. He tried to remedy the situation, but it was too late — his wife had ripped up the invitation and he didn’t have the organizer’s name. He was very embarrassed by it all, and he discovered how dangerous his wife could be for him. He tried to call one of his friends in Berlin but nobody had answered. It was the day before the conference. He found it impossible to cool down. He slept in the living room that night and decided he would go see his sick mother.
By the following morning, the painter still hadn’t regained his composure. He was in a hurry to be far away from home. Bitter over the canceled conference, he’d pondered the situation while driving to Fez, where his mother lived. He recalled a recent dinner with friends at the Mirage Hotel just outside Tangiers. His wife had started to say terrible things about one of their mutual acquaintances. She just made things up, saying whatever came to her mind, and had accused this person of almost drowning their children, then stopped in midsentence and addressed her husband: “You’re not a man, and you’re even less of a husband! If you were a real man you would cut ties with that so-called friend who almost killed one of your children!” Unable to take any more, the painter had lost all control and had thrown a glass of water in his wife’s face. She reacted immediately and threw a glass of wine in his face. His eyes could no longer see and he spent a few moments in complete darkness. Everyone in the restaurant had witnessed the scene. The other couple had tried to calm things down. But the violent way in which things had happened made him feel really bad, and he blamed himself for his lack of restraint. He would never again let himself go so far. His eyes welling with tears, he left to go for a walk on the beach with his friend. “When violence sets in,” his friend had said, “married life is no longer possible, everything quickly boils down to makeshift repairs and lying to oneself. At that point, divorce is the only option.” It was the first time he’d heard anyone use the word “divorce” in reference to them.
Whenever his wife left on a trip and he found himself alone with his children, their house in Casablanca would suddenly become calm and life would unfold without any drama. Even his children’s behavior grew less petulant. The painter would observe his house and say to himself: even the walls look more relaxed. An unusual sense of calm would reign over the house, which he would have liked to prolong beyond those absences. But how would he manage to do it? When they lived in Paris and he would go to work in his studio, he would wind up spending the night there because he sensed that a storm would be waiting for him on his return home. Thus he would postpone it for a night, hoping this would lessen the tide of recriminations. His wife suspected that he wasn’t alone during those nights, and she would barge into the studio in the middle of the night and then leave without a word. She started referring to his place of work as a “so-called studio,” or even bluntly as a “brothel.”